Thursday, February 28, 2019

The Springhill Massacre

The Springhill estate in the 1980s

The Upper Springfield area of west Belfast suffered
many traumatic events during the years of conflict. The area was the target of
British military invasion and occupation, pogrom and refugees. Scores of its
citizens were killed. Many more were injured. Hundreds spent years in British
prison camps and gaols. The British Army used every weapon in its formidable
arsenal to try and intimidate and terrorise the people of the Upper
Springfield. Brutal beatings, the frequent use of CS gas, the indiscriminate
firing of rubber and plastic bullets, arbitrary arrests and torture, were all
part of the daily experience of the civilian population. So too were attacks by
unionist death squads, working in collusion with, and under the cover of
British Army and RUC actions.

One legacy of this British government
counter-insurgency strategy is currently playing out in a Belfast Coroners
Court where 10 of the 11 citizens killed during the Ballymurphy Massacre in
August 1971 are seeking the truth about the events surrounding the murder of
their loved ones.

11 months later, on a bright Sunday evening on 9
July 1972, and just yards from the scene of the Ballymurphy Massacre, five more
civilians were shot dead by British troops. That evening British Army snipers
were hiding in what was then Corry’s timber yard overlooking the Springhill
estate and the Westrock Bungalows.

The Springhill estate and Westrock Bungalows
represented some of the worst public housing existing at that time. The
Springhill estate was a concrete, soulless estate with no public facilities.
The Westrock Bungalows were temporary aluminium structures. They were built in
the 1940s and 40 years later were still being used by large families. By then
they were in a poor state of repair. The bungalows were cold, damp structures.

The Springhill Massacre reflects in many ways the
events the previous year in Ballymurphy. All those shot dead were civilians.
The British claimed that the victims were gunmen or had been caught in
crossfire during a gun battle. None of this was true. Three of those killed
were children, one was a father of six and the last was the second priest from
the greater Ballymurphy area to die in the conflict.

Belfast Telegraph report which presents British Army version

On Tuesday evening in the Cultúrlann the
families, their lawyer Pádraig Ó Muirigh, and prominent lawyer Michael
Mansfield relaunched their campaign for truth. The families and other eye
witnesses recounted the events of that evening in 1972.

John Dougal who was aged 16 was the first to die.
He was the eldest of eight children. He was shot as he tried to help others who
had been shot.

Margaret Gargan was 13 years old. She had been
sitting talking with friends in the street when she was killed. One of her
friend’s recalls: “We were only sitting
talking, you know the way wee girls talk about things. Next thing she fell
down. We never heard the shot. Within a couple of seconds, she was lying on the
ground. It all happened so quickly. Then everybody started to scream.”

Fr. Noel Fitzpatrick was a curate at St. John’s
Church on the Falls Road but was based at Corpus Christi only a short distance
from where he was shot dead. He had gone out to try and help a local man,
Martin Dudley, who had been shot and wounded. He was shot through the neck.

Paddy Butler was 38 and had six children. His son
Eddie had been one of those shot and wounded during the Ballymurphy Massacre
the previous August. Paddy had gone out with Fr. Fitzpatrick to help the
wounded. Fr. Fitzpatrick was waving a white hanky. As they bent over the
wounded man a bullet went through the priest’s neck and into Paddy’s head. Both
died.

The last victim was David (Dee) McCafferty who
was 15 years old. He was with Fr. Fitzpatrick and Paddy Butler trying to help a
wounded man. When Fr. Fitzpatrick was shot Dee tried to pull him to safety and
was shot several times.

Subsequently, forensic evidence showed that none
of those killed or wounded were armed or had been in contact with any weapons.
An RUC detective admitted that there was no investigation into the killings.

The trauma for all of these families has
continued for 47 years. In the years afterward it was especially difficult as
the British Army and RUC often singled the relatives out for additional
harassment. Paddy Butler’s daughter Jacqueline remembered that: “Although Daddy was an innocent man, because he had been shot by
soldiers, the RUC raided our house every week after he died, ransacked it at
four or five in the morning. Mum didn’t understand that either. She used to
say, ‘How could they do that to us after killing Daddy?’ Every time there was a
knock on the door, she would shudder and think of the day Daddy went out and
never came back.”

Like the Ballymurphy families the Springhill
families have been campaigning for years for the truth. In December 2014 the
Attorney General John Larkin agreed to the establishment of new inquests. In a
letter to the family he said: “It seems
to me that the truth about what happened in Springhill on 9 July 1972 is, at
present, only likely to emerge through an inquest.”

That was over four
years ago. The decision by the families to relaunch their campaign at this time
is because currently, due to a lack of funding for inquests, there appears
little likelihood that the Springhill Inquests will be heard in the next few
years.

In 2016 the North’s
Lord Chief Justice, Declan Morgan, proposed a plan to deal with all inquest
cases within five years. It was blocked by Arlene Foster. Last year a Belfast
Court ruled that Foster, as First Minister, unlawfully
stopped a discussion at the Executive of the plan by the Lord Chief Justice. It
was claimed that because the majority of the inquests relate to state killings
that the DUP leader refused to allow an inquest process to go ahead which would
"rewrite the past." The funding
has been blocked since then.

The Springhill families deserve support. They
have demonstrated enormous courage and perseverance over almost 50 years.
Writing last week in this paper Fr. Des Wilson put it well when he said:

“There is
still a long way to go to reveal the truth about what our neighbours suffered.
It is worth the journey because one of our most heartening principles in the
truth will set us free, and so it is the duty and privilege of us all to reveal
it.”